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We did the same and there is one big contradiction between this and the research linked: you're not holding them or walking until they sleep, you let the kids fall asleep on their own with the confidence that you'll be back.

In my country you get a monthly check in with experts for the first 6 months and then less frequently. Mostly to weigh and check growth and arrange shots etc. But they also take some time to discuss how things are going and publish a booklet per age group with advice to parents.

Their advice (based on other research) is to strongly avoid holding your child until she sleeps and instead recommend exactly what you did.

The reason is that if you are holding the baby, they fall asleep and then wake a bit or switch to lighter sleep some time later (like every human does periodically every night) they will encounter a different environment and the holding prent is gone. That's going to wake them up fully and get confused. So now you have a crying baby in the middle of the night that you need to hold again to get back to sleep.

While if they fall asleep in their bed, feeling safe that you'll be around, a few hours later if they wake up they'll determine that everything is still OK and as they expect it to be, and continue sleeping.

On a related note, if you sit with them while they're going to sleep, make sure it's "for a while before they go to sleep", not "until they go to sleep", or it becomes a contest where they stay awake as long as possible to keep you there.

I agree with not holding the infant until they sleep, that probably makes the greatest difference. I don't understand the check-ins, because they fall asleep so quickly anyway and we don't want to disturb them.

Kids and families are different, but do keep in mind that there is a world of difference between an infant and a 1-year old like the grandparent (perhaps literally?) poster was talking about.

There is nothing inconsistent about holding an infant and then sleep-training a 1 year old.

Also, lots of kids really resist sleep and can take quite a while at it. That's where check-ins come in.

It's really age dependent. We didn't do it as structured as OP going back at exactly 3 minutes etc. When she was under 1 year old she would sleep within 5 minutes, so no need to go back.

Now that she's older and speaking, she sometimes doesn't want to go to bed and will tell you. Then it helps to communicate that you'll be back and they're not on their own. Gives enough comfort that I almost never do more than come back once after 10 minutes or so, and over half the time she's already sleeping. If not I just say good night again, hand back the stuffed animal that by that point has usually been thrown out of the bed and that's it.

Yeah, this is the advice I've always seen with sleep training. It's important to put them down drowsy but awake. I find this extremely challenging. If the lights are on I can tell, but when it's night time and I've got the lights out I have no idea when he's drowsy but not asleep yet, and he's extremely light sensitive so I can't just have a light on. So I often accidently put him down asleep and he actually does just fine.

The visiting the room at regular intervals works great. I only have two, and left it late with both. 5yo just fell asleep on his own for the first time a few weeks ago, still hates the idea, but doesn’t scream at least, now he knows I’ve not abandoned him…

Why have kids (if I read these comments) have such an ingrained idea that you will abandoning them? Is that subconscious, and/or just an emotional response? As in, why would they not presume the inverse (that you will always be there)?

I assume it is more of the "if the parent leaves me, I am going to die" reflex that is ingrained in babies, so the danger is great enough to warrant panic, even though it is improbable. Plus, very young kids don't have object permanence.

I heard of a parent telling a young kid that beyond the turn on the road there is a Foobarator, and kid dutifully keeps within safe distance without knowing what's a Foobarator nor what threat it poses.

I remember at age 7 being afraid of tigers and dinosaurs at night, sometimes I watched tall coconut trees. I also asked my mum if she will abandon me for a mistake.

Infants especially sleep BETTER when there is noise and people around. For an adult noise means something is possibly coming to harm you and your family at night so it awakens you. For an infant, lack of noise means abandonment and the response is to cry as infants are helpless without their parents

Oh interesting, so having ambient noise helps babies sleep?

I've read somewhere that white noise is similar to what they hear while they are inside their Mom, so this puts them into a familiar environment, which makes them calm.

They make stuffed animals that play white noise or even human heart sounds. Not sure whether there is scientific data on this, but a lot of parents use them.

I had an extremely fussy colicky infant. I never thought that noises would help him sleep. But I noticed he would sleep if I was holding him and talking to someone. One day he was overtired and screaming because he could not sleep, and I turned on the vacuum. He went straight to sleep. It got me thinking about why that would be. Almost all adults would not welcome a vacuum on to fall alseep. We got a white noise generator after and it helped him out.

Like managing a team of diverse thinkers: "Do what works for you(r team)!"

Put yourself in the kid's place: You don't know how to calm yourself, you don't know how to keep yourself warm, you don't know how to get around, you don't know how to get food. You are 100% dependent on people around you. The only thing keeping you alive is the goodwill of those people, and your ability to alert them to your problems. The default is no assumptions, just scream when there's a problem - assumptions are learned.

I was just watching some baby birds who kept calling for the parents for food, and it must be ancient evolutionary speaking as well?

Evolution's indifference is sometimes indistinguishable from cruelty. Presumably we're all descendants of the human and pre-human babies that freaked out at the flimsiest sign of abandonment. Presuming further, the ones who didn't may have had better outcomes for themselves and their parents 99.9% of the time, until e.g. they got lost in the tall Savannah grass just one time, and because of that never got to grow up and have children of their own.

Even if it only happened to, say, 20% of the quiet babies, it's enough to surpass the costs of paranoia.

I suspect that there were evolutionary pressures at play here.

With my kids, I used to do visits with increasing intervals. 1st time after 1 min, then 3 min, then 5 min, then 7 min,... I never reached 11 min before they were asleep.

    I have more than 4 kids

Did you stop counting after 4?

Lots of things stop working after 4. (5 here)

One very important limitation: you run out of hands.

Let me present my 2-year-old's second favourite music, after Van Halen - Jump :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8ccGjar4Es

This is amazing, I almost want to have more kids so I can have them love this song.

I'm tempted to slip it in at a rock night.

No, but if I say the exact number I'm even easier to pin down.

I did much the same thing when the kids were about the same age. I would also put a kitchen timer _in the room_ set to 3:10. So at 3 minutes I got the reminder to stop what I'm doing and go to the room. Then at 3:10 their timer goes off and I came right in the door. The idea was to teach them that the timer brings the parent, not the crying.

We had minimal problems with the two oldest, but the youngest one is impossible. I think I’ve tried all the tricks in every book to make him sleep in his own bed the whole night. I think I can count on one hand the times that have actually happened. Hopefully we/he will figure it soon.

> What I did was walking in at a fixed schedule, starting

Wow I never heard this before, it sounds like a great idea. Did you learn from someone else or figured out yourself? I struggled with getting kids to sleep by themselves.

Learned it from a book in Danish - God Nat Sov Godt, originally written by a Spanish physician/doctor so if you don't know Danish but can find the author I think there is a fair chance it might exist in more languages.

What about under 1 year? Facing the same issue

I think the consensus is that letting them cry is unhealthy when younger than 6 months. But when over 6 months:

What we used to do is to have a simple fixed routine (e.g. drink milk, sing a short song, put them in bed) so she knows what's coming and put her in bed no matter what. Crying or not, just put her in bed softly, ignore the crying, say some nice things and walk out in a friendly way.

Come back after 3 minutes of crying. Stroke/hold/sing until she stops crying (usually immediately when you come back). And then put her in bed again in the same way. Often there will be some crying in protest of being put back in bed, it's really hard, but you have to put them in bed then in the same friendly/soft way as the first time.

Then keep doing this in increasing time intervals. We did 3 min, 5 min, 5 min, 10 min and then keep it at 10. But we rarely got to 10 after the initial week of doing this. I've heard several other parents that did the same thing, some after speaking to a sleep coach. It worked for many, but it takes consistency and a bit of time to start working.

Is this Elon's secret account? :p

Na, he’s talking about parenting, not fathering

Putting an infant alone in a room of their own seems to be an exclusively western practice and is completely foreign to me.

3500 American babies due suddenly and unexpectedly from SIDS every year. I wonder if there is any research into where these babies were sleeping when they died. Am I an idiot for wondering if they died from the sheer terror of waking up alone in a dark room?

This is not how SIDS works.

Children just stop breathing. Some newer research suggests this is a genetic issue.

Of course there is misdiagnosis for children that suffocate because of toys/blankets.

Everyone stops breathing sometimes, but SIDS babies lack certain hormone that causes reaction (start wiggling to remove pillow or start screaming). IIRC Australian scientists identified the marker recently.

Sort of. Australian scientists discovered there is a correlation between low levels of the enzyme BChE and increased SIDS risk. It's worth noting that there's a fair bit of evidence that actually points to AChE rather than BChE, but AChE is much more volatile and so harder to measure.

It's a particularly interesting finding because we already know that low levels of BChE correspond to an additional challenges waking up from anaesthetic, and the working hypothesis is that this may be linked to the arousal system.

One other potential link is to SUDEP (Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy), which so far we also don't understand the cause of, but it may be similar to SIDS (or in fact, it may even be the exact same condition) - it often presents very similarly (face down in bed, no obvious signs of suffocation, etc.). In fact, in Australia and New Zealand, SIDS is being renamed to SUDI (Sudden Unexpected Death in Infancy), which sort of speaks for itself in terms of similarities.

Actually for SIDS there are studies that show co-sleeping is correlated, in particular with alcohol and smoking from the parents.

Studies show that to prevent SIDS you should sleep in the same room as the baby, but not in the same bed.

Most important seems to be:

- don't smoke

- always have infants sleep on their back

The recommendation in the US is to have infants sleep in the same room in a bassinet. Then moving to a crib, often in a separate room, around 4-6 months.

Co-sleeping is also somewhat popular, but it greatly increases the chance of SIDS with risks skyrocketing for smoking mothers and those who are bed-sharing but don't usually do bed-sharing.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2065975/

The current recommendation in the US is strongly encourages same room for a year.

To help prevent SIDS, I highly highly recommend a product called the Owlet Smart Sock. It was discontinued due to not being FDA approved but it is still available on eBay and it is a potential lifesaver. What it does is that it's a pulse oximeter that sounds an alarm if your baby stops breathing or their blood oxygen falls below a threshold. This device potentially saved the life of one of our kids and I cannot recommend it enough. Our baby had fallen into a too deep sleep and though he looked peaceful his blood oxygen was very low and we had to aggressively wake him up to get him to start breathing again.

The product I am talking about is NOT the Owlet Dream Sock. That version is useless for this purpose. You need the now-discontinued Owlet Smart Sock, of which the most recent version was version 3. I believe the app is no longer available in the app store, and you need the app to use it, but I think if you have an Android device you can probably find an APK on one of the APK mirror sites. Personally, I have the iOS app which I still have due to having installed it on my phone before it was discontinued.

I hope someone will make an open-source product like this. It's conceptually quite simple: connect a pulse oximeter to a loud audible alarm. I would also love to be able to get an adult version as well for my grandparents that would call 911 automatically if they stop breathing or their heart stops. Calling 911 automatically would not be allowed in a product I think, but it could be done in an open-source / open-hardware product where the builder of the kit takes on the liability of breaking the 911-related laws (which in my view is a tiny price to pay for saving a loved one's life).

If any hardware hackers are looking for project ideas, an open version of the Owlet Smart Sock would be an incredible thing to build for the world.

P.S. my pet theory for what causes SIDS is that the part of the brain stem that controls breathing needs time to develop, and when the brain is super young that part of the brain is not yet fully developed, and is susceptible to failing to do its job. I think of an analogy to how people can die of failing to breathe during a heroin overdose, wherein that same part of the brain is put into a state where it doesn't maintain a high enough breathing rate. I suspect the failure mechanism in the overdose situation and the SIDS situation might be analogous.

Thanks for the product rec. Does this work via bluetooth or did they somehow keep the servers on?

They somehow kept the servers on; the app gives you push notifications when there is an alarm, even if you are not home.

I just ordered a MAX30102 module to test with. You are invited to contact me, my Gmail username is the same as my HN username.

Nice!!

Wasn't the Owlet discontinued because of multiple reported false negatives?

Meaning it failed to detect a drop in oxygenation? Unless it fails 100% of the time, it would still be useful since “alerts on some non-zero percentage of life threatening conditions” is better than the alternative which is no alerts at all.

We had one and I think it made one or two false positives where basically it fell off. I can’t say anything about false negatives since none of our children stopped breathing. (It had two alerts, one for losing skin contact and one for low oxygen. The first one we got all the time when forgetting to pause the base station before removing the sock, so that bit certainly worked.)

The doctors recommend keeping an infant in the same room for 6 months to 1 year. Most say 1 year.

This must have been the default for human history probably as well, I am thinking.

They also said the switch to putting babies back side down (as opposed to stomach side) had something like a 50% decrease in SIDS in the US.

I'd wager that for most of human history at least three generations lived in the same room.

I’m not sure. Biblical accounts seem to indicate everyone had their own tent. Granted, these were rich patriarchs, so maybe not the norm back then.

Is anyone here familiar with the subject across ancient cultures more broadly?

Personally, I sleep better when I’m alone. Haven’t convinced my wife that we should have a separate king and queen suite, though.

Not ancient, but I come from indigenous folks that live Southeast Asia. Because we're from up high in the mountains, the traditional way of living is supposed to go back quite far in time.

There are still a few that live traditionally in what basically is a large, two-floor long house for a multi-generational household. The families live on the second floor in one large room, but often with a small loft area for a quasi-third floodr The bottom floor is open with no walls (just support beams) to keep the animals. So it's constantly noisy.

We bought a breath monitor which is a desk/plate (about 20x50cm) with a small device attached via a long cable. You put the desk under the mattress and hang the device somewhere on the crib. When it's on and the kid would stop breathing, the device starts beeping really loud.

It already triggered a few times for us, luckily in all cases it was because we carried the baby from the crib a forgot the turn off the breath detector :-D

Would you be willing to share the name & brand of that product? Thank you.

I have the Babysense 2 Pro, which may not be exactly the same brand as OP is describing, but does fit their description.

Obviously, it's one of those things where most people will never actually know if it works or not (thankfully), but based on the fact that it goes off without fail every time I forget to turn the damn thing off after picking the baby up fills me with confidence that it does do what it's supposed to.